2. Thus thou, Ravine of Arve--dark, deep Ravine-- Thou many-coloured, many-voiced vale, Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene, _15 Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne, Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame Of lightning through the tempest;--thou dost lie, Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging, _20 Children of elder time, in whose devotion The chainless winds still come and ever came To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging To hear--an old and solemn harmony; Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep _25 Of the ethereal waterfall, whose veil Robes some unsculptured image; the strange sleep Which when the voices of the desert fail Wraps all in its own deep eternity;-- Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's commotion, _30 A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame; Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion, Thou art the path of that unresting sound-- Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee I seem as in a trance sublime and strange _35 To muse on my own separate fantasy, My own, my human mind, which passively Now renders and receives fast influencings, Holding an unremitting interchange With the clear universe of things around; _40 One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings Now float above thy darkness, and now rest Where that or thou art no unbidden guest, In the still cave of the witch Poesy, Seeking among the shadows that pass by _45 Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!